About the Editor

Roberto has over 25 years experience in the IT field, and has spent the last 12 years working in the intersection of open source software and business development. Roberto has taken an active interest in different open source projects and organizations, he has served on advisory boards, and helped large IT vendors, open source vendors and customers to design and deploy their open source strategies. After serving as Senior Director of Business Development at SourceForge for over 4 years, in 2016 he started a new company called Business Follows, whose mission is to is to help developers, companies and organizations to make Open Source development a key part of their business strategies. He is the editor of commercial open source blog.

After mentioning some public and tv ads sponsored by the Italian Government, I reported some findings from the EC-funded project tOSSad – Towards Open Source Software Adoption and Dissemination. The project, aiming at improving the outcomes of the F/OSS communities, proposed to use mass media and branding of Open Source products to address identified weakness. The weaknesses of the F/OSS solutions perceived by the experts in the IT throughout Europe namely were:

Lack of Awareness.

Lack of Training.

Lack of Entrepreneurial Culture.

Unwillingness to Change.

Lack of Connectivity

Lack of awareness cluster, composed by answers which have identified problems in public knowledge about F/OSS solutions, included categories of answers like: “public is uninformed about OSS solutions”, “no public interest and no marketing”, “low penetration of IST and Open Source in SMEs in the region”.

The solutions proposed by the experts, ranging from “awareness campaigns about social and economical benefits” and “using mass media for advertising (by large F/OSS based companies)”, to
addressing the younger generation, for example “involve schools and universities to promote F/OSS solutions”.

As results from another Gartner Dataquest graph, the compound annual growth rate of open source software will more than quintuple that of proprietary software in the next five years. More important, the growth of the emerging phenomenon of Internal Open Source Development.

Customers are getting themselves organized, because small to large Italian firms can’t accomplish their needs. The Italian ICT market is a fragmented archipelago, made by lots of micro-companies where only 0,2% of ICT firms employ more than 250 employees. Small IT firms sometimes employ also gifted hackers, but they can’t manage to keep them busy doing just what they are really good at. Medium to large ICT companies offer a suite or two, often based on third parties open source products, and have no connection with open source communities.

As shown by an OpenLogic study, a quarter of interviewed customers using more than 100 Open Source products can boldly affirm that they saved more than 60% of their IT budget. While 44% of customers using about 1 open source product answered that is “too early to tell”. At the end of the day, open source is not a magic wound, and you need an open source policy and strategy to really take advantage of.

But the Italian open source market, likely not differently from many other European countries, has almost no open source product firms. VAR are having big trouble to sell off-the-shelf Linux distro, and to retain customers is not easy as soon as they get technologically autonomous. System Integrators and ISV, no matter how big they are, have no capacity to define and sell packaged services yet.

The absence of a wide enterprise grade commercial support opened new opportunities, allowing firms like BlackDuck, OpenLogic, Palamida, SpikeSource and SourceLabs to offer “horizontal” services not related to a single package. For example, firms offering intellectual assets protection take deliver assessment services for many if not all packages.

Their business model might be considered “horizontal”, as opposite to the classical (vertical) business model, where a firm offers every kind of services for a single package/distribution.These companies will play an important to role in the developing of an efficient and effective open source ecosystem. Nonetheless traditional forms of partner engagement might not work, and things like Open Source Franchising will definitely come to play, soon.

[…] Roberto’s latest comment reminded me of his presentation at quifree. One of the points he made was about the missing ‘perception’ of Free/Libre software, a constant discussion theme during the years at FSFE. What are the values of Free Software? How to make such values meet the needs of users, citizens and companies? While many people in the community dismiss the issue easily marking it with the bad word ‘marketing’, I don’t think it is neither bad nor simple to address the perception issue. […]